Thursday 6 December 2007 19.17 EST
First published on Thursday 6 December 2007 19.17 EST

History suggests law and order is the last refuge of a government in a hole. So we had a triple whammy this week of more prisons, tougher immigration rules, and 42-day detention without trial. A new sentencing commission may help cap prison numbers, and a points system for immigration might make sense, but the net intended effect was tough, tough, tough.

Remember the desperate dying Tory days and home secretary Michael Howard's ever-more senseless punishments? First his "prison works" policy sent prison numbers soaring: Home Office graphs show how judges follow politicians' punitive words. Howard's final act was to put US-style two-strikes-and-you're-out sentencing on to the statute book for Labour to implement. (In the US a man went to jail for stealing a slice of pizza.) Howard meant to test the limits of Jack Straw's "tough on crime" rhetoric. Would the shadow home secretary follow him? Yes, of course. He'd probably have brought back the birch if Howard had gone one step further. But talking to him at the time, just before the 1997 election, he would say to the likes of me, with a wink and nod, it would all be OK once Labour was in power: we're decent people at heart who will do the right thing. Wait and see, don't worry.

Ten years later, anyone with a shred of liberal fibre in their body has learned better the hard way. After 37 crime, justice and police bills, the prison population has risen by 20,500 to 81,500, and now the government is proudly planning - yes, deliberately - to imprison another 10,500. Here is Jack Straw proclaiming three new prefabricated titan superprisons. Titans! My, they sound tough. These new PFI prisons will cost another £2.7bn by 2014.

Consider the disastrous message here. This proclaims the government doesn't expect any of its social programmes to have any good impact on crime. On the contrary, things will get worse. The 10,500 extra young men imprisoned in 2014 will be Labour's children, arrived in school in 1997. Young offenders will have been born under Labour and yet more not fewer of them will "need" to be locked away than under the Tories.

So much for Labour's improving schools, extended school activities, expanded youth services, the Yips (youth inclusion programme) designed to catch children at risk before they offend, or a score of other acronyms from Labour's neighbourhood programmes. All wasted, all dust? Of course not - but we will lock up ever more young men anyway. Martin Narey, former prisons chief, now head of Barnardo's, points out: "Fewer young people are offending and their offences are diminishing, but if you build prisons you fill them up."

Listen to ministers complain that crime has fallen by 40%, including violent crime, yet voters refuse to believe it. But who is to blame for that? Of course people think crime must be rising when prisons are bursting as never before. Labour has pumped up fear of crime. Magistrates responded by doubling their custody rate, judges by increasing average sentences from six to 27 months.

As for the Brownites, I can't count the number of briefings and hand-wringing asides I have been treated to over the years, bewailing terrible Blairite law-and-order policies. They used to whisper that the chancellor refused more Home Office money to waste on the disgraceful rise in prison places, instead of prevention and remedy. Either the Brownites lied on this (and many other things), or they didn't really know their leader and simply invested in him their own hopes. If the latter, then they should rebel right now. Jack Straw, who as foreign secretary took us to Iraq, will always do his master's bidding. (If, incidentally, titan superprisons were meant to please Daily Mail readers, the story appeared on page 8 under the headline, "Never mind justice, now judges are told not to lock up criminals if the nation's prisons are full".)

This week historians, led by David Cannadine, launched a brilliant - but sobering - history and policy website (historyandpolicy.org), giving brief and pithy accounts of past social policies, their successes and failures. If politicians would only browse here, historians hope, they might learn from what has gone before and stop reinventing so many square wheels. They would boast less about "new" ideas and their own "successes" compared with the past.

Frankly, if ministers bothered to study their own departments' recent work it would be a good start. Visiting one minister the other day, just as he launched a vital new policy, neither he nor his special advisers had ever heard of a very expensive and highly successful pilot scheme his predecessor had just completed as he left. When government's own memory is goldfish short, what hope for deeper history?

Look at the website's paper, Historical myth-making in juvenile justice policy, by Abigail Wills. She exposes two contradictory myths: that there was a golden age of law and order; and that treatment of juveniles is now more enlightened. Blair launching Asbos talked of his father's day in the 30s and his own youth when "people behaved more respectfully to one another and we are trying to get back to that". It's bunk: think of teddy boys and razor gangs. We tolerate much less minor violence than we did, and we tolerate teenagers less.

As for "enlightened treatment", the paper finds it more severe now than at any time since the 1850s, locking up more young people for lesser offences. Approved schools and borstals belonged under local authorities, not in the prison system, and were no worse and maybe relatively better than our suicide-prone, overcrowded youth offender institutions: the head of the Youth Justice Board resigned recently in disgust, with 70% of its budget spent on imprisonment, leaving little for prevention or rehabilitation.

Only two years ago the Carlile inquiry gave shocking descriptions of "children kept for up to 14 days in a bleak dilapidated cell with only an old rusty metal frame bed for company". The age of criminal responsibility was only recently reduced to 10 years. "The punitive stance of the last 15 years is historically unusual," says Wills. She quotes every era's historical boasting both that they face worse youth crime and that they deal with it better than before. Labour tops the league for both myths.

David Cannadine is optimistic in calling for historical advisers in each department under a chief historical adviser to the government. Wise old memory might be a forbidding ghost at the political banquet: he might make odious comparisons with the radical bravery of Labour in 1945 or Lloyd George in 1906.

History itself reminds us why Labour politicians don't refer to history when it comes to law and order. They don't much care, in this game of positioning and posturing, of seeming not doing. Crime has fallen in an extraordinary way - not because of policy but probably because of the economy, since it has fallen across the west in countries that imprison many fewer than the UK, and in America that imprisons many more.

There is plentiful evidence of "what works" in preventing reoffending - and it's not more prison. But Labour has taken us backwards, feeding punitive sentiment instead of persuading by proving what works. Douglas Hurd cut the prison population in the higher-crime Thatcher era: Labour has hugely inflated it.